The Be Brave Project, Day 37; Old Women Better Than New Women.

Yesterday, in the late afternoon, I shuffled out of my apartment building carrying two shopping bags filled with: One green and orange Vietnamese pottery bowl, One English glazed Octagonal Bowl, one very large English Tea-pot, one smallish sized plate featuring a picture of young-ish Elvis Presley wearing black leather, one glass vase shaped like an alien's egg or a pod of some sort, 2 needle pointed Paris coasters, and a beaded mat with my grandmother's initials on it.

I rounded the corner just as the M11 bus was coming, and banged down the street using careful fast mini-steps--caught the bus down to the UWS, my new building. Hauled the bags up to the 16th floor (as usual, the door people ignored me, which I love; cannot imagine anything weirder/more off-putting than someone noting your every coming and going) and came dashing back down to catch the M4 to 59th and 7th. Saw the M4 coming and ran full throttle 2 blocks to catch it.

I was going to see the Screen Actor's Guild screening of The Women. Written and directed by Diane English, starring Meg Ryan and Annette Bening.

Oh, How I wish I'd stayed in my new apartment and grouted the tile!

In the New Yorker review, Anthony Lane (who I adore in a sort of girlish fluttery way) said that in the screening he saw, the audience laughed during the opening credits, when Mick Jagger's name came up as a producer for the film. And that, for the next 1 hour 50 minutes, was the last laugh heard.

I sort of wish that had been the case when I saw it. I felt like some kind of foreigner in my home land, as the audience jovially chuckled to lines as stellar as, "What do you think she sells, Chanel Number Shit?" Oh how my sides ached from--oh, actually they didn't. The film covers every tedious sitcom convention from the late 80's on; Seinfeld references ("The Vault"), Gratuitous "women are built to shop" jokes, "oh those chicks and their circular arguing" scenes, and of course, the kicker of them all, the most fabulously life-affirming and original way to end a movie. . .the Childbirth scene.

Because childbirth is--get this, it's pretty damn funny!--painful!

Surprising, yes?

No.
No no no.

No one wants to see it, the knees book-ending the ears, the red-faced screams, the bystanders (do they really allow 3 people to mill about a woman while she's giving birth?) I've always said that if I get knocked up, there's nothing more important to have in the delivery room than a magazine editor.

The elegance and ferocity of the original film has been carefully milked out of this piece of tripe. Where Crawford and Goddard were jungle cats from the street, dangerous and sleek, the other characters managed to unsheath their claws fairly regularly despite their society upbringings. The 2008 film is toothess, moorless, and at heart utterly unsympathetic to its characters.

Ironic that The Women doesn't even bother to let its characters be recognizably human, witty or intelligent. I'd have settled for one out of three. What is peculiar is that it seems almost intentionally cruel to its actresses: The film is often lit like an interrogation room--Bening has never been shot worse--and it seems at times as if English gave up on providing us with wit, plot, and action. She simply gave the audience what she believe they want, Meg Ryan's odd new face viewed from awkward, searching angles.

All I can hope is that this somehow whets the world's appetite for some true bitchery, down in the dirt girl-fighting, and cynicism: Watch the original 1939 MGM film directed by George Cukor, starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and the astonishing Rosalind Russell in a seminal female comedic performance.